Setting a Page Name eVarSetting the Page Name in an eVar, while somewhat nontraditional, can be used for many different purposes. In this post I will cover just a few, but I am sure those reading this can come up with many more. The implementation of this couldn’t be easier. Simply pass the s.pagename value to an eVar and you are done! The following sections will outline how I use this variable once it is set.

Campaign PagesLet’s say that you are running a bunch of online marketing campaigns and you want to see how many pages on the website people coming from each Campaign Tracking Code view. In SiteCatalyst, the main way to figure this out would be to use DataWarehouse, ASI or Discover unless you read my last post and had set a Page View Success Event. But now let’s take it a step further. What if you want to see the pages that visitors from each Campaign Tracking Code viewed on your website. Easy right? Not so fast. There is really no easy way to see this in SiteCatalyst using out-of-the-box reports. One way to do this would be to use the Get&Persist Plug-in to pass the Campaign Tracking Code to a Traffic Variable (sProp) on each page of the visit and then use a Traffic Data Correlation to correlate this new sProp with the Page Name variable, but that is a lot of work! The other way is to use a Page Name eVar. By default, your Campaign Tracking Code report will store and persist the Campaign Tracking Code for multiple page views (you choose your time frame in the Admin Console) so if you begin to store Page Names in another eVar, you will have an intersection between Page Name and Campaign Tracking Code on each page. That allows you to use a Conversion Variable Subrelations report to see all Pages viewed by visitors coming from each Campaign Tracking Code You can see this by opening up the Campaign Tracking Code report, selecting the Page View (Event) metric and clicking the icon next to a specific Tracking Code to break it down by the Page Name eVar. Once you have done this, you should see a report like this:

Channel Pages TrackingIf you role up your Campaigns to higher-level Marketing Channels using SAINT Classifications you can use the concept from the Page View Event post to see how many pages are viewed on your site after visitor arrive from each Marketing Channel.

You can then break this report down by the Page Name eVar to see the most popular pages for each Marketing Channel:

While this is not as granular as viewing Pathing by Campaign (as I demonstrated in this post) , it can give you a high-level view of what pages are popular for each different marketing channel. If you are using the Unified Sources DB VISTA Rule or Channel Manager plug-in, it gets even better as you can see what pages people coming from another website or SEO are viewing on your website by breaking down a particular SEO keyword or external website link by Page Name:

Internal Search Follow-On PagesIf you are properly tracking Internal Search on your website, you should have Internal Search Terms stored in an eVar so you can use this concept to break down Internal Search Terms by this new Page Name eVar (while using the Page View Event) to see what pages visitors view afterthey search on each specific Internal Search Term:

What Page Does Success Take Place?Another side-benefit of setting a Page Name eVar is that you can see on which page a Success Event takes place. For example, if you set a “File Download” Success Event and a file is available on several pages, you can subrelate each file name with the Page Name eVar to see which page is the most popular for downloading each file.

Conversion Variable QAFinally, there is a completely different use for the Page Name eVar – Quality Assurance. Often times, you will run into situations where you have eVars that have bad data or no data at all (the dreaded “None” row!). Often times, these issues are hard to troubleshoot. However, if you have a Page name eVar, your life is much easier.

Let’s say that you have forms on your website and when visitors complete a form, they are required to enter a “Company Size” field which is stored in an eVar. However, there are many cases where you are seeing the Form Company Size eVar with no data. This might mean that IT forgot to make the field required on some of the Forms (would never happen right?). How do you figure out which forms are causing the issue? All you have to do is the following:

Open the eVar report that has data issues with a relevant Success Event metric (Form Company Size and Form Completes in this example)

Find the row that has bad data or no data (“None” row)

Click the breakdown icon to break the report down by the Page Name eVar

The resulting report (see below) will show you a list of Page Names where SiteCatalyst set the Form Complete Success Event, but did not have a corresponding Form Company Size eVar value

You can then send this report to your IT team to help them find pages where there may be tagging issues. You could even schedule this as a recurring report to you and IT so you are alerted when similar issues arise in the future, which helps with overall data quality. Keep in mind that this will only work if the eVar you are looking at has Full Subrelations or you add Full Subrelations to the Page Name eVar (see below).

Final ThoughtsAs you can see, there are many different uses of this functionality. The following are some final pointers related to this topic:

As previously noted, if you plan to use the Page Name eVar extensively for testing, I would recommend that it have Full Subrelations so you can QA all eVar reports, not just those that already have Full Subrelations.

In one of the rare times I ever tell clients to do this, I would recommend that you set the Page Name eVar to expire at the Page View in the Admin Console. Expiration beyond that will probably add little value and only slow down reporting. There are some special things you need to do here if you use Custom Links so I would advice you speak to Omniture Consulting about this.

Consider Classifying the Page Name eVar by Page Type, Page Product Category, etc… to increase the value you get from this eVar.

4 Comments

Great insight as always. This is a potentially powerful analysis to assist with answering ‘what happens beyond that landing page’ amongst others. As with many of your tips and tricks I’m wondering if you (like I) hope that features such as these should be rolled into the analytics application so that – in an ideal world – the data collection process becomes simpler and the analysis tool becomes more powerful. OK, so I hear you saying that products like Omniture Insight already do this (!) but I’m thinking about this in a new light after hearing Josh James say of the Adobe deal:

“Integrating Omniture technology into Adobe applications means you can drop tags into projects created in applications, such as Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. Today, customers call us to walk them through setting up and tagging pages. We hope they tag all the pages on the Web site, but that’s one of the challenges. We hope in the future you can just push a button and know the tags are already there. Perhaps you might have a feature in Adobe’s products to automatically create the tags as you build the Web site or the advertisements.”

Now, you and I both know that this is possible today – we can just drop basic SC code into a site, add a pagename plugin and we have basic stuff — my hope is that we get to add basic code to a site / application as Josh describes and still have the power of the tips and tricks you kindly share. Example #1 would be merging evars and sprops into a single variable that handles traffic and conversion / attribution. This would immediately solve the sprop1 = evar1 = “value” thing!

Until this happens keep up the great work!

Cheers, J

flashrashDecember 9th, 2009

I have been searching for sites related to this. Glad I found you. Thanks

The #1 thing that throws my colleagues off about SiteCatalyst is the difference between the Pages and Pages for Conversion Reports. When they want to know what page an event (newsletter sign up, petition signature, etc.) took place on they naturally go to the Content > Pages report and start adding conversion events.

Oh how I wish that would be what they assumed it was. But instead, SiteCatalyst is showing them which Pages the users viewed PRIOR to triggering that event, and dividing the event attribution between them all. (!!)

Adam Greco is a longstanding member of the web analytics community who has consulted with hundreds of clients across every industry vertical. Adam has managed the Adobe Analytics programs at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Salesforce.com. As one of the founders of the Omniture (now Adobe) Consulting group, Adam managed accounts large and small and helped clients maximize their use of Adobe Analytics technologies directly and indirectly through his extensive blogging. In 2012, in partnership with Adobe, Adam published the first-ever book on Adobe Analytics – The Adobe SiteCatalyst Handbook: An Insider’s Guide. In 2015, Adam was elected to the board of directors of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) where he now serves as Treasurer.
As an employee of Analytics Demystified Adam is a member of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), an Adobe Business Partner, and a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Adam is also a Board Advisor at the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), Snowplow Analytics, ISDI Digital University, Claravine, Beringer Capital and Decibel Insight.